Varieties of Religious Experience

Old Time Relijun's heat-poisoned hillbilly calisthenics are an intriguingly cracked-out, shaggy-tail
reconstruction of Captain Beefheart-- except that this band ...

Old Time Relijun's heat-poisoned hillbilly calisthenics are an intriguingly cracked-out, shaggy-tail
reconstruction of Captain Beefheart-- except that this band's version of the legendary acid-soaked
California cornball would be decked out in a Black Candy t-shirt and smoking up on the leas of Olympia's
Evergreen College. But to call these guys a mere knockoff would be plainly inaccurate: Old Time Relijun's
longtime frontman Arrington de Dionyso (billed apart from the rest of the band here, for reasons which
will become clear later) also shares some of the more rambling compositional leanings of sometime Relijun
drummer Phil Elvrum's Microphones project, albeit stripped of its nature-boy preciousness and less
successful in tossing disparate sunspots together into one unified, fuzzed-out menagerie.

Of course, Dionyso seems more interested in investigating animal languages, tongues of fire, and Walt
Whitman hoboism than imparting any narrative epiphany to the listener. And despite his own purposeful
eccentricities, he admirably transcribes his corncob dreams as though they're concrete maps to opaque
surfaces; and not even half as pretentious as he could be, he seamlessly works Where the Wild Things
Are into the refrains of his manifesto, A Kabbalist Exegesis of Old Time Relijun.

Sporting a John-the-Baptist-cum-Abraham-Lincoln beard and sounding at times like Yoko Ono conjoining with
Tom Waits and Jad Fair to painstakingly rewrite the Jesus Lizard back catalog as countrified scrawl,
Dionyso launches from Tiny Tim whimpers to high-pitched inhuman squeals, throaty bullfrog scat, and dewy
mountain-top bellows in a matter of seconds. His gusto is impressive, but oft times lacking a clear-sighted
cosmology for his discursive, shambling worldview-- his consistently twisted enunciations lose power,
previously novel cadences blend into overdone sameness, and his rickety rollercoaster backing band becomes
a predictable merry-go-round.

Varieties of Religious Experience, a collection of twenty-one unreleased sermons or unheard alternate
versions of previously released material, is the band's first full-length since 2001's more successfully
honed Witchcraft Rebellion. Twenty minutes longer than its predecessor, this longwinded retrospective
contains a multitude of versions of certain bits of songs, often moving from Dionyso's one-man four-track
work to the more fleshed-out approach of he and his rotating crew of back-up players. These are interesting
as studies in composition, but the repetition slows the passion down, stalling the bombast into a tired
holding pattern of indulgently predicated aftertastes.

Admittedly, though, one of the strongest tracks is one of these repeats. The first of two versions of
"Telephone Call" showcases Prince's "Kiss" blended with a serving of Doolittle-era Black Francis-style
preachin' man vocalizations: Imagine "Wave of Mutilation" as a soulful come-on, broken into staccato, and
physically, freakishly dismembered. Another keeper, the organ-driven "Black Cat" introduces a nice shift
to the standard foaming-at-the-mouth approach. Reminiscent of the Bad Livers or a jive-talking Daniel
Johnston, it blends spoken gibberish, Ono-esque machine gun stutters, and a faintly audible sermon treading
beneath increasingly vocal organ sustain into a finely catchy pop excursion.

There's much to like about Old Time Relijun, and Dionyso's previous dreamquests have yielded a robust stab
at busted-plank outsider hiss, but on this unfocused retrospective, the randomly placed stylistic tweaks
and vaguely useful repetitions can't raise the hue and cry beyond a mishmash of Trout Mask Replica
envy. At the end of the spaz attack, it's the smartly plotted cohesion of Dionyso's proper recordings that
creates a forward-moving juggernaut; here, amid the schizophrenic haberdashery, the autistic Hugo Ball
schtick runs thin too soon.